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Translator/Editor: Order

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◈ Paladin of a Ruined Order

Chapter 79

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First Step

Elbridge arrived at the forest with his companions.

"This is the forest."

Marcus looked a little surprised.

"I've passed through this forest plenty of times. To think an archdemon's seal was here..."

Rombel looked around like someone inspecting a building site.

"Surprisingly unremarkable place. Where do we go from here?"

Elbridge shrugged.

"I'm not sure either."

"You don't know? Didn't you spend two hundred years here?"

"I did spend two hundred years here. But it was underground, not on the surface, in a stone chamber with barely a sliver of light coming in. How would I know the location?"

"You must have come out of the stone chamber and found your way somewhere eventually."

"I was already out of my mind, and I just walked through a forest I'd never seen before without any plan. It'd be stranger if I remembered the way."

Rombel made a sour face. That expression alone told Elbridge exactly what he was thinking.

'I'm tired. Can't we just go back to Solenion?'

Of course that wasn't an option.

At least, unlike the hopeless Rombel, Marcus was a resourceful and experienced mercenary.

"Let's search it step by step, then. Sir Elbridge. Is there anyone who might know where that stone chamber is?"

"There probably were people who knew, once. But there's no one left alive who'd know now. Even back then, not many people knew the location."

"That's surprising. I figured anyone who needed to know would've known."

"There's an important principle when sealing a demon. Keep the number of people who know the seal's location as small as possible."

"Why's that?"

The answer came not from Elbridge, but from Rombel.

"Because there were lunatics running around breaking seals."

"What? Who did that?"

"Plenty of them. There were demon worshippers. There were people who hated or envied the paladins who fought demons... Now that I think about it, there was even someone who argued demons were just another form of god and needed to be freed."

"Isn't that last one technically true? Kind of suspicious..."

Marcus's serious reaction made Rombel snort.

"There were so many idiots throwing out theories that some of them were bound to land close to the truth by accident. And so what if part of it touches on the truth? The solution was completely wrong regardless."

"Well, I suppose so."

"Now that I think about it, there were also people who broke seals expecting the demon to reward them for it, like in old stories, and ended up dead instead. Anyway, the world is wide and fools are as countless as stars in the sky."

Elbridge chuckled softly as he listened.

And he surprised himself a little.

At the time, those people had been genuinely infuriating and hateful. But looking back now, it all felt like fond memory. Time had a way of romanticizing even the most absurd things.

Marcus asked Rombel, "Couldn't each church keep its own seal in storage? Seems like that'd be way safer."

"You saw what happened down south when the churches fought each other, and someone lost their mind, didn't you?"

"Ah... yeah, I saw that."

A paladin of the Sinking Shadow Assembly hadn't been able to hold back their fury and had triggered a stampede.

Something similar could happen anywhere, anytime.

"Anyway, since there's no one left to ask about the chamber's location, we'll just have to find it ourselves."

"Is that even possible? It's not as big as the Great Forest, but it's not exactly a small patch of woods either."

Rombel sounded skeptical. But Marcus paid him no mind and turned to Elbridge.

"Any clues at all? Anything works."

"Hmm..."

"Actually, let's start from the beginning. I've been curious about this. Sir Elbridge, why did you go into the seal in the first place? Down south this time, and before that at the Central Magic Tower too, paladins usually don't get sealed alongside the demon."

"There were several mages assigned to seal the archdemon, but they all died fighting it. Mages are a bit slow. Take your eyes off them for a second and they're dead."

"...You're describing it like a chick got mauled by a badger."

Rombel snickered as he listened. Marcus's comparison wasn't elegant, but there was something accurate about it. Fresh, too.

"Anyway, with no mages left, the archdemon's core was unstable enough that it could've broken free at any moment. We had to finish the seal right then, improvised or not."

Elbridge's explanation came without hesitation.

He'd revisited the memory so many times that he didn't need to dig for it anymore.

"The expedition leader picked volunteers. Several brave paladins stepped forward. I was one of them... In the end, the expedition leader chose me."

"Because you were the strongest?"

Elbridge shook his head.

"You might think I'm something special now, but back then there were plenty of paladins stronger than me."

Marcus glanced sideways at Rombel, and Rombel bristled.

"No. There weren't plenty. Paladins on his level, so-called Paladin-rank, you'd find maybe one or two in a mid-sized combat church at best. Paladins clearly better than him were even rarer. Same goes for me, I was pretty capable myself, even by the standards of that era."

"Who said otherwise?"

"Marcus. I'm not so dense that I can't read that shifty look in your eye."

Marcus and Rombel both turned to look at Elbridge at the same time.

The two of them were demanding an honest evaluation.

"Rombel belonged to a non-combat church, but he was better than most combat-church paladins. Good enough to make up for the lack of divine power with sheer skill."

"Hmph."

Rombel's voice rose a notch, apparently unsatisfied with Marcus's lukewarm reaction.

"Give me something more specific. This guy thinks I was some kind of pushover."

Something more specific, then.

Elbridge thought it over for a moment and said, "Seventy-five points."

Vague, but it gave a reasonable sense of the scale.

Marcus nodded, but Rombel still seemed unsatisfied.

"I won't ask for eighty, but isn't seventy-five a bit low? Even being harsh about it, I'd say seventy-eight, seventy-nine feels about right..."

Elbridge let Rombel's request for a re-evaluation go in one ear and out the other.

"Anyway, once I volunteered to become the seal's core, the paladins finished the sealing. My memory cut off for a while... and when I woke up, I was in an underground stone chamber. That's the whole story."

Just a list of memories, with no information about the location.

But Marcus kept reasoning from the limited information he had.

"This forest is completely unremarkable. Not a lot of people pass through, and there's no large city nearby... You know what that means?"

"Not exactly a place you'd expect an underground chamber to be."

"Exactly. That chamber was probably built specifically to house the seal."

Rombel asked, "So what does that tell us?"

"If you look at the surroundings through the eyes of whoever built the chamber, the answer comes to you."

Marcus's steps carried him off the forest path.

"If it's a chamber meant to hide a secret seal, they wouldn't have built it somewhere people could easily stumble on. They'd need a spot people wouldn't normally visit."

Marcus pointed toward the deepest part of the forest.

"Building it back there would be ideal... but somewhere that deep, hauling materials in would be a nightmare."

"Materials?"

"You said it's a stone chamber, so they'd need materials for it. Nobody in their right mind carves an entire chamber out of solid bedrock. Anyway, if I were a laborer, I'd find some excuse to avoid working way out there."

"Laborer?"

Marcus clicked his tongue.

"You don't think paladins picked up shovels and built the chamber themselves, do you? If I were a paladin and someone told me to grab a shovel and build it myself, I'd make excuses first. Something like, if we build it half-assed and the chamber collapses, the seal could break... In the end, they'd have to call in laborers."

That much made sense.

Still, one thing bothered Elbridge. How had they silenced those laborers afterward?

It would be nice to think they'd used trustworthy, tight-lipped workers. But less pleasant methods might have been used instead.

'...Not something I can do anything about now.'

Marcus kept walking around, continuing his line of thought.

"Not over here or over there, there's a stream running through. If there's a stream, the ground gets soft. Heavy rain could flood it, and that'd be a problem... Along those same lines, somewhere slightly higher than the surrounding area would be ideal. Hills drain water well."

Rombel looked a bit put out. It seemed to sting his pride that a human like Marcus knew more about this than he did. But construction wasn't Rombel's field of expertise.

Of course, it wasn't exactly Marcus's field either, as a mercenary... but Marcus had a habit of picking up all sorts of odd knowledge.

"But definitely not too high up either. Too visible, and they couldn't risk anyone spotting the workers. That narrows it down to a handful of likely spots... Sir Elbridge. Do you remember anything about the scenery you saw after coming out of the chamber?"

Elbridge dug through his memory.

Elbridge wasn't particularly good with the names of trees or plants. But there was one tree even he couldn't help but recognize.

A tree with bark unlike any other, pure white.

"A birch tree."

That day, Elbridge had prayed to the goddess in front of a birch tree. He was certain of it.

"A birch tree. That narrows it down enough. Let's take a look."

Marcus led Elbridge and Rombel wandering through the forest.

Far enough from the paths people traveled, but not deep enough to count as the forest's interior, slightly higher ground than its surroundings, and a birch tree nearby...

How long had they wandered through the forest like that?

Marcus, who had been stomping his heel against the ground, grinned.

"Here it is."

Elbridge tapped the ground as well.

Unlike the rest of the forest, made of soft soil, there was a distinctly different feel to it here.

And right in front of them stood a pure white birch tree.

"Let's see. There should be an entrance somewhere around here."

"...Bushes. There were bushes nearby."

Marcus and Elbridge swung their swords, cutting away the surrounding bushes.

Sure enough, a staircase hidden among the bushes came into view.

Marcus rubbed his chin.

"This is a lot easier to find than I expected. A sharp person who put in some effort could find this."

"Other people probably don't have as many clues as we do."

"Well, that's probably true, but..."

The three of them descended into the dust-filled underground.

The stone chamber wasn't large. About the size of a small stable that could fit two horses.

"You sat here for two hundred years?"

"It was worse than that. I was stuck inside a small seal the whole time."

"What did you do all that time?"

"Nothing."

Elbridge pretended to stay calm, but he felt an unbearable suffocation pressing in on him.

His breathing grew shallow and quick, while his heart pounded violently as if it might burst.

The chamber walls seemed to close in from every direction. Cold sweat ran down his back.

Elbridge took a deep breath and thought, 'It's an illusion. My senses are lying to me.'

He closed his eyes and breathed a few times, and the feeling eased a little.

Still nearly unbearable, but...

Marcus pointed to the pattern carved with precision into the wall deep inside the chamber.

"Is this the seal?"

Elbridge shook his head.

"To be precise, this cube is the seal. The pattern on the wall is a circuit meant to stabilize it."

At the center of the pattern, a translucent cube bulged slightly out from the wall.

About the size of a person's upper body.

Elbridge ran his hand over the cube.

Cool and solid. Elbridge had endured two hundred years sealed inside this small cube.

Elbridge stared quietly at the translucent cube.

And then, he noticed something strange.

"Hff!"

Elbridge grabbed the slightly protruding part of the cube and pulled with all his strength, wrenching it out of the wall.

Stone dust and dirt trickled down.

And there, in the space where the cube had been embedded in the wall, the three of them found a small but distinct crack.

"...This."

A crack that looked as if someone had pressed a sharp chisel against it and struck it with a hammer.

But that wasn't all.

Something more important lay beyond.

Beyond the wall, where dirt and stone should have blocked the way, there was an empty space instead.

Rombel murmured, "Someone dug a tunnel in from the other side. They broke the seal from behind, without anyone noticing."

Niserath's guess had been right.

Someone had broken the seal.

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